Nazguls and Dementors:
- They both served good, then served evil out of greed.
- Both give off a sudden chill when they are near.
- Appearances are similar.
Main characters Frodo and Harry:
- Both have relatives that hate the main character:
~ Dudley, Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia.
~ Lotho, Otho, Lobelia.
The prefix "Ara":
- Aragorn, Arathorn, Arador
- Aragog
Both have giant spiders that the main character and his best friend have to face:
- Shelob (Frodo and Sam)
- Aragog (Harry and Ron)
Dark Lords Sauron and Voldemort:
- Both were diminished, but not yet destroyed, and before they returned to power they had no human form.
Both have moving trees:
- Tolkien: Ents and Hurons.
- Rowling: the Womping Willow.
Both have a 'Good Wizard':
- Gandalf
- Dumbledore
Both have a good wizard that turned evil:
- Saruman
- Tom Riddle (though when he turned evil he was commonly known as Lord Voldemort)
Both have a dark forest that everyone fears:
- Mirkwood, Fangorn to some.
- The Forbidden Forest.
Both have things that warn them of the dark lords.
Harry, his scar, Frodo the Ring.
Frodo has a Ring that makes him invisible, Harry a cloak.
Someone on ComingSoon!.net once read an interview with Rowling and she said she had never even read LOTR when asked about the comparisons, a few years later I read another and she said she read it when she was young. So why the first denial?
The opening of both Harry Potter and The Hobbit is similar. The Dursleys were considered very decent people and never wanted to have something to do with mischief and strange. Bilbo didn't want to get into any adventures. The Dursleys had relatives wich were doing the opposite of them. So did Bilbo.... he had his Took relatives who just did the opposite of Bagginses.
The plots of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and The Lord of the Rings are parallel.
Wise wizards (Dumbledore/Gandalf) mentor and guide the "little" people (children/hobbits) who are short on wisdom but tall on courage. The evil sorcerers (Voldemort/Sauron) are weak in the beginning of the stories and must be prevented from regaining the power they had lost. Voldemort and Sauron attempt to acquire magical objects (the Sorcerer’s Stone/the One Ring) that can make them strong again. Possession of the Sorcerer’s Stone has given Dumbledore’s 666-year-old friend, Nicolas Flamel, the key to immortality; similarly, the One Ring has enabled Gollum, a hobbit, to live for more than 600 years; and Bilbo, the hobbit who acquires the Ring after Gollum loses it, has also lived a longer-than-normal lifespan.
The heroes, the boy wizard Harry and the hobbit Frodo, are both orphans who find themselves in situations in which greatness is thrust upon them. They feel obligated to do the right but difficult thing, rather than what is easy, for the common good. Harry and Frodo play major parts in defeating the villains, although they are not the ones who ultimately destroy the magical objects. Mooney notes in his article that Harry and Frodo suffer from scars as a result of wounds inflicted on them by the enemy. While The Lord of the Rings ends after the Ring is destroyed, Sauron defeated and order reestablished in Middle-earth, the destruction of the Sorcerer's Stone in Harry Potter only temporarily prevents Voldemort from becoming powerful. Voldemort finds other means of surviving and growing stronger in the other three Harry Potter books that have been published to date.
In The Lord of the Rings, Barliman Butterbur is the bustling, kindly, but forgetful innkeeper of The Prancing Pony, and he serves excellent ale. Rowling may be cleverly playing on Butterbur’s name when she calls the frothy, buttery, non-alcoholic hot drink that the Hogwarts students love "butterbeer."
The hobbits of the Rings trilogy are fond of inhaling "through pipes of clay or wood, the smoke of the burning leaves of a herb, which they called pipe-weed or leaf". The best variety of pipe-weed is known as Longbottom Leaf. Interestingly, Longbottom is the last name of the boy in Harry Potter whose favorite subject is herbology.
The villains of both fantasies are often referred to indirectly, as if they are too terrifying to name. Boromir and his brother Faramir, valiant men from Gondor, call Sauron "him that we do not name." Other men of Gondor sometimes call Sauron The Nameless One. Most wizards in Harry Potter refer to Voldemort as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named or You-Know-Who.
Wormtongue, the deceitful advisor to King Theoden, is really serving Saruman, the good-wizard-gone-bad in The Lord of the Rings. Wormtail, or Peter Pettigrew, in Harry Potter, is the wizard who betrayed Harry’s parents to Voldemort. Peter is nicknamed Wormtail because he can transform himself into a rat. Until his true identity is discovered in the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, he has been in hiding as Harry’s friend Ron’s pet rat, Scabbers.
In spite of their treachery, both Wormtongue and Wormtail’s lives are spared by the good characters. Calling Wormtongue "a snake," Gandalf says, "To slay it would be just," but he advises King Theoden to let Wormtongue go free. Wormtongue sets off to join Saruman. Toward the end of The Return of the King, Frodo again shows mercy to Wormtongue, telling him he need not follow Saruman. However, when Saruman kicks Wormtongue in the face, Wormtongue finally snaps and retaliates by killing Saruman. In Harry Potter, Wormtail would have been killed by two adult wizards, Remus Lupin and Sirius Black, if Harry had not intervened. Harry believes his father would not have wanted them to kill Wormtail. Harry thinks it would be best to have Wormtail sent to the wizard prison, Azkaban. Just as Harry and the other wizards are taking Wormtail to Dumbledore, Wormtail escapes. Wormtail finds Voldemort and becomes his servant again.
There are willow trees that are very much alive in both fantasies. Old Man Willow in Tolkien’s trilogy actually swallows the hobbit, Pippin, has another hobbit, Merry, in a tight grip, and tips Frodo into the water after lulling him to sleep. The equivalent in Harry Potter is the Whomping Willow in the Forbidden Forest that swings its branches wildly and tosses anything in its path. Once, Harry and Ron arrive at Hogwarts in a flying car, and it is caught in the Whomping Willow, with disastrous results.
I see the Dementors in Harry Potter as close in likeness to the Black Riders because they are hooded, cloaked figures who inspire fear. The Black Riders or Ringwraiths were once kings who became corrupted when Sauron gave them rings of power. They appear to be both material and immaterial, capable of physically as well as psychologically attacking their enemies.
It is uncertain as of the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, what the Dementors actually look like, although Harry once caught sight of a hideous, decaying hand under the cloak of a Dementor. The Dementors are the guards of Azkaban; they have the power to suck the souls out of the prisoners by giving them the kiss of death.
In Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Bilbo saved his dwarven companions from giant spiders in the forest of Mirkwood. The Lord of the Rings features a giant, ancient spider named Shelob that feeds on any living thing that comes her way. Frodo is stung by Shelob, and Sam valiantly battles Shelob alone. In Harry Potter, Harry and Ron meet spiders in the Forbidden Forest whose king, Aragog, resembles Shelob in size and appetite for flesh. Ron's fear of spiders had been established, and this incident tests his bravery. Aragog would have fed Harry and Ron to his spider kindred, but the boys narrowly escape.
Mirrors are used as means of revelation in both fantasies. The Mirror of Galadriel is "a basin of silver, wide and shallow," which the Lady Galadriel fills with water. After breathing upon the basin, she invites Frodo and Sam to look into it so that events in the past, somewhere else in the present, or future may be revealed to them. They take turns looking and are disturbed by what they see. They do not fully comprehend the events revealed until they experience these events later.
Rowling introduces another device in the fourth book, called a "Pensieve," that reveals events in the past. The Pensieve is a "shallow stone basin," and Harry sees a "bright, whitish silver" substance in it. The shape and color of the Pensieve and its contents are reminiscent of the Mirror of Galadriel. Harry is drawn to the Pensieve while he is alone in Dumbledore’s office, and he finds himself "falling" into it when he peers closely at it. He is transported in time to a different place and witnesses some significant events. Later, Dumbledore explains to Harry that when his head is too crammed with thoughts and memories, he uses the Pensieve to collect his excess thoughts in order to examine them at leisure some other time. Dumbledore then demonstrates how he siphons his thoughts into the Pensieve.